Plum Blossoms in Paris (6 page)

I turn left, down the wide, commercial Rue des Écoles, and start looking for a hotel in earnest. I want to feel settled in, take a nap. When I pass some potted evergreen plants, I pause and peer in the large glass window, where bland, unlived-in lobby furniture awaits. I step back to catch sight of what’s written on the red awning. When I spy the elegant, unlikely name in gold cursive, my jaw slackens.

Hotel California
.

I laugh, feeling like Holly Golightly, and bounce slightly on my heels. Closing my eyes, I hope for a sign. None comes. Yanking the double doors open, I push my way through. We’ll see. It could be heaven or it could be hell.

“May I help you,
mademoiselle
?” the concierge inquires from behind the C-shaped desk. He has obviously been waiting all morning for me to enter his life.

I smile brilliantly at him. “I hope so. A room for one, please.”

“Oui, mademoiselle
.” He starts punching keys on the computer. “How many nights will you be staying?”

Until I run dry. Patting the four thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in my bag, I sigh. Thank you, dear, dead Grandmother Lyons.

“Indefinitely.”

I
“did” the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in the following days.

And arrived at the bleak realization that I would trade both of Venus de Milo’s missing arms for a single squeeze of my hand in smog-choked Cleveland.

But it is not my intention to push postcards.

So, lifting a lens from
cinéma vérité:
imagine a movie montage, running over the accordion’s wistful vibrato, tracking our heroine while she takes in the sights (do not fail to notice how achingly lonely, when lingering on charming bridges, one looks in Paris, all alone), and then imagine a slow fade to a more weary figure—let’s call her “Seasoned Daisy,” looking more languid than that fresh girl who gawked at Notre Dame, if also disappointed. For what is Paris but old, grave buildings, heavy with a history she cannot own, peopled by strangers she cannot talk sensibly with, and bittersweet with apples no more succulent than the fruit back home. And notice that this Daisy has bowing pouches under her eyes from crying herself to sleep, missing her boyfriend more than she might have in America because when you are in a new place, you wantold, dear people to make it feel like home, especially in new places where romance is like a disease you cannot catch. And finally, envision the caption under this more melancholy manifestation hailing
Four days later
in rain-streaked letters. Good enough.

Besides, there is the stranger on the train. And I’m not a tease.

Wednesday then. The thirteenth of October. Lucky thirteen.

I linger over my croissant and
café au lait
in the hotel restaurant. There are other travelers there, married couples efficiently downing the typical French breakfast, bread and coffee, the warm-up
(un petit déjeuner)
for the serious business of lunch, ginning up their enthusiasm so they can attack their itineraries with gusto. One fellow, an American (I just know), has it spelled out for him on his Palm Pilot. His wife, a wan forty-something with pink lipstick slashed across her lips, flakes the crust off her croissant with a fingernail and looks coolly into her steaming coffee rather than at her husband, who is likely determined to get his money’s worth for this second honeymoon that has cleaved him from his TiVo and favored Adirondack chair.

It looks like I’m not the only one struggling to match the ideal of Paris with the reality. If I had to guess (and I will), they’re both thinking that it was easier to ignore one another in a 3,000-square-foot house than locked side by side on their way to the Pompidou Centre. But the BlackBerry won’t be denied. And so they march on.

While the wife buries her nose in a copy of
Elle
, I rise to leave. The husband looks at my ass and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

My outlook is on the grimmer side of gray today. Maybe I just sat in something gross.

I take the metro to the Musée d’Orsay. I visited last Saturday and fell in love with the third floor of the museum, which was transformed from an abandoned railroad station in the late seventies. Most of the pieces on the first floor pay homage to the academicpainters, and while I dutifully scoot through the rooms, thick with Ingres and Delacroix, the idealized paintings and sculptures leave me a little flat, like a string of catwalk models too perfect to invest yourself in. Take
The Birth of Venus
, by Cabanel. What you have here is the soft-core porn of the age, made palatable for the masses by tapping a mythological figure, instead of a modern, breathing woman whose skin failed to achieve the same creamy luster, but in whose blemishes we might recognize ourselves.

Venus, exposed, is sprawled on the waves, affixed there by some force that has also rendered her unconscious, but oh-so fetchingly, that sinewy form and cascade of hair showing off every advantage of the female form. Lovely. I can appreciate the passive beauty there, but the appeal is corrupted by the most overused, nauseating figures in the history of painting: cherubs. A sexy woman is lying there, and it’s disturbing to see little babies with wings flying rapaciously over her, like they’re either going to pee on her or suckle her to death. It’s cowardice to paint sex like that, and then couch it in cutesy, Rococo crap. This is a painting destined for wall calendars. Put it somewhere between Anne Geddes and
Maxim
. And yet this was
the
painting in the 1863 Salon. It’s obvious men were the judges. Sexually repressed men, boasting boners beneath their breeches.

I advance further, past the academics and realists. Here’s a real painting:
Olympia
, by the revolutionary artist Édouard Manet. She is also unclothed. But this woman is a prostitute. Her tight, compact form, propped up on pillows, is angular where Venus is curved, and she looks out evenly, not a little bored, scorning us a trifle for our churlish voyeurism. The brushwork, anticipating impressionism, is crude in places, but expertly employed to secure a sense of immediacy
and
permanence, like an entire lifetime can be held within a moment. The easy sentimentality of Cabanel, and of many of the Romantics, has been sloughed off, as Manetstakes his claim—on the tip of Olympia’s kittenish heel—as the father of modern art. Olympia finishes this floor off (she has no use for its fawning slightness), for it is she, more than any goddess or virgin, who is ascending toward impressionism, and the future we still seek.

Dodging students on a school field trip, I ride on the escalator to the third floor, where Manet’s second masterpiece,
Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (Lunch on the Grass)
takes center stage. Another naked woman (not a nude, which is classical) confronts us, sitting next to two clothed beatniks, deep in discussion. If Olympia’s nakedness shocked, this woman, inserted without context next to disinterested men, scandalized.

A voice crawls over my shoulder, and I prickle with some misplaced sense of intrusion at my private devotion. The voice explains that the painting required two armed guards due to the outraged reception it received at The Salon. The idea of someone attacking the priceless piece of art rouses my interest, and I turn.

There is a middle-aged couple, complete with leather fanny packs, facing me. The man has a comb-over and looks as bored as some of the schoolchildren. His eyes rove like a blind man’s, sweeping for a landing strip that doesn’t require too much from him. He settles on a pretty blonde looking at a Pissarro. The wife fans herself with the museum pamphlet, while staring at the tour guide, who has his back to me. She asks him an insensible question about water lilies, and the tour guide explains that Éduoard
Manet
is not the same person as Claude
Monet
. “Common misconception,
madame
, for people unacquainted with the French language.” His tone is cordial, if pointed.

I hide a smile.

The woman looks disappointed. “Because I’ve always loved them so. My daughter, Penelope, got me an umbrella with those lilies on them. She picked it up somewhere in Chicago, I think, on a business trip. She works for Ernst & Young, you know.” Flip to the hair. “Anyway, it was darling. Phil had one of his lapses and forgot it in our rental car once, on a trip to Ocracoke, and
poof—”
here she unleashes a hand gesture meant to express contempt and remorse—“it was gone. Such a shame. I loved that little umbrella.
Adored
it.”

Phil is nonplussed. The blonde has a friend.

“Anyway, do you think they might sell it in the gift store here?” she asks the guide, putting a hand on her fanny pack and stroking the money inside.
All in good time, my pretties
. …

“I’m sorry,
madame,”
the guide replies. “One what?”

Something about that voice … low and clear, like a cello shadowing Bach.

The woman starts her obsessive fanning again, in spite of the cool temperature. “Why, the umbrella of course. With the lilies. Or maybe those sunflowers of Van Gogh’s. You know”—she looks at him expectantly—“something pretty.”

At this, the tour guide, just a man with brown hair and a smooth voice until now, turns toward me, mumbling, “I can inquire for you,
madame
. I am sure they have all sorts of pretty trivial things for you to choose from.”

It should come as no surprise that it is my stranger from the train.

I draw back while he takes me in, almost knocking into the priceless treasure on the wall and inflicting more injury on it than my fellow Americans’ indifference toward anything not made famous by its perversion. He smiles uncertainly, probably trying to place me, while I study him. He is older than I, likely dreaming of nailing Charlotte, or some French equivalent of the hot cheerleader, when I was still worried about losing my retainer on field trips. He is tallish, but not overbearing, and thinner than good health allows for, the hollow pockets under the high cheekbones designating him as the distractible type who neglects to eatbecause there are other, less ridiculous, matters at hand. I imagine him with coffee for breakfast, wine for dinner. With more potent hungers in between.

A pre-Raphaelite nose dominates his slim, oval face, but the effect is softened by wide, deeply held eyes whose outer corners drag slightly, their accompanying air of concern reinforced by that furrow between the brows. He has the most beautiful lips I have seen on a man, and it is impossible to look and not desire them to brush my more meager canvas. Not gratuitous, but still sensual, they hold soft indentations where the lips meet to suggest a phantom kiss. Never mind the rather crooked teeth they conceal. He is not ashamed of them, and smiles at will. He has a high, erudite brow and cropped brown hair. A layer of beard fuzz marks him as a casual shaver. His eyes, again? Like amber. And like any foolish creature silly enough to venture closer, I am caught.

Senses in overload, I scramble for sensibility. “Hey.”

Hey?
My right knee quivers, seemingly with laughter, or sobs.

“Hello again,” he replies, and with a slight bow (yeah, that’s right, a bow), escorts the two troglodytes away, toward the pretty, safe rooms of Renoir and Monet.

Again!
I am reeling.

Love at first sight is pure foolishness, of course. It’s probably the art. My loneliness. Paris.

If someone would only inform my knee. It continues to shiver from some internal hysteria I am at a loss to control. Like suffering the giggles in someplace sacred. Like an earthquake has just shuddered through my fault-ridden body, eviscerating everything. Like my nerves are pure, radiant electricity, feeling for a place to ground. It’s not love, I tell myself. Just neurological mutiny.

Of course, it’s not love at first sight at all. This man, and those eyes, have been with me all week. If I have been mourning my past with Andy, it was to prepare myself for this future. Rarely have I been so conscious of the power of the present. I am here, now, perched on the pivot of time, leg shakily extended.

There is a choice to be made. Things don’t just happen. Either I follow him, or I don’t. There is risk, of course. My mind leapfrogs like a choose-your-own-adventure, foreseeing every denouement before we have a story. Being rebuffed seems the mildest possibility, and one I can handle. There is a permissive element to being in a foreign land, with only the judgment of strangers to reckon with, and I can bear, after pocketing a handful of disgraces in the past week, the humiliation of his laughing in my face. Swinging to the other, more dizzying side of the spectrum, there is the sad inevitability of our parting, perhaps a month away, after my money has run out, each of us unwilling to abandon our country of origin. I could never be French. I haven’t the stomach for it. And I already see that he has a healthy disdain for Americans. Our affair will end, not like some inscrutable French film, but with a purer, American sense of tragedy. Like
Casablanca
, without the noble sacrifice. I’m already starting to miss him—us—and I don’t even know his name.

Ridiculous to presume this on the piffling authority of a few careless looks and words? Perhaps. But entirely human.

So then, the question is one of longevity. What is a month worth? To entertain the old cliché about it being better to have loved and lost than never loved at all? I’m not sure. My tolerance for pain has been squeezed, my ego pinned by Andy’s slippery half nelson. Uncertain, I look up at the naked woman in Manet’s masterpiece, for I am still rooted, dumb, to this spot while a stream of tourists files past. Her gaze strikes me anew, in that sandpapery white noise. Now her stare is faintly conspiratorial, daring me. With a shudder, I remember that the woman is dead, that this museum is a morgue of sorts, and that the artists and their muses bewitch us into believing that they are immortal. That painful, naked flesh is no more except for this strange, beautiful painting and its bastard offspring, cloned onto coffee cups, tote bags, and umbrellas.

Her face is my springboard. I will throw myself at mortality, and take a leap of faith.